When former Counter-Strike: Global Offensive 
pro player Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek became a full-time streamer in May 2018, Madrinas Coffee was his very first sponsor. Since then, Madrinas has activated the partnership with a Shroud-branded roast and cold brew cans, and benefited from significantly increased exposure as Grzesiek has become one of Twitch’s most-viewed streamers.
Now, Madrinas has gone beyond partnering with individual influencers, signing with League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) team the Golden Guardians . It’s the first organizational sponsorship for the company, and according to Madrinas co-founder and vice president Alex Davis, it’s a partnership built from a shared vision of creating content and collaborating for unique activations.
“It’s just the community that I really love and believe in, and I love to see and help it grow.”
And as GSW Esports head Hunter Leigh explained, the deal is also a godsend for his LCS team’s coffee-addled players. The Esports Observer spoke with both Davis and Leigh about building an organic relationship between the companies, the logistics of bringing the deal to life, and why calling this partnership “authentic” isn’t simply another case of tossing around a popular buzzword.
Emphasizing Esports
Davis co-founded Madrinas Coffee with his brother Justin in 2013, but the 28-year-old has competed and followed esports since he was a teenager. With Madrinas, he sees an opportunity to help grow the esports industry while also building the company’s own brand with an engaged audience.
“Half of my life has been dedicated to esports and being in this community either as a competitor or now as a partner with a coffee brand,” he said. “I’ve been in and around esports in North America since about 2004. It’s just the community that I really love and believe in, and I love to see and help it grow.”
Grzesiek is the company’s most visible streaming partner to date, but Davis said that Madrinas now has a couple dozen influencers on its roster. The opportunity to partner with the Golden Guardians, which is owned by the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, came pretty casually—they met at TwitchCon last year and started talking. As the relationship grew, they saw an opportunity to unite with this partnership. Davis’s enthusiasm was apparent during the interview.
Credit: lolesports/Riot Games
“It was a very, very natural way that we were able to build a relationship together, in keeping with the way that we’ve built all of our relationships in this community,” he said. “It’s just been sort of: become acquainted, become friends, and then talk about if there’s an opportunity to work together. As we start talking about it, if we unearth really cool opportunities—activation ideas or concepts—then we try to lay that out over what we think would be an appropriate timeline. And then… hell yeah, at that point we just go, man.”
Golden Opportunity
The Golden Guardians signed first sponsor Plantronics earlier this year, putting the company’s RIG headset branding on its LCS jerseys. That partnership was built on history, as Plantronics already had dealings with the wider Warriors organization, but the pairing with Madrinas came out of the blue. However, the team was already eyeing a potential sponsorship deal with a coffee brand due to interest from its roster—so teaming up with Madrinas was a perfect fit. And it could lead to further opportunities down the line.
“It’s about true, positive advocacy and about a true, positive spirit when it comes to our collaborations…”
“For Madrinas, they’ve been in lots of pitches around all of these things,” said Leigh. “But I think being part of an organization that was looking to build an authentic partnership from the beginning, but also potentially have legs to do other things down the road, to come in as […] something along the lines of a ‘founding partner.’ To be in with us early before expansions and greater success and other things to come, I think was really appealing for them—to be able to shape what partnerships for the Guardians and Warriors Esports more broadly looks like going forward.”
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It’s a new kind of arrangement for Madrinas Coffee, which is used to working with individual content creators rather than an entire organization of people—including many who aren’t visible or well-known to fans.
“Learning how we can still establish that base level of trust with them was something that we knew we hadn’t done before,” said Davis. “But at the end of the day, all we ever really look for in a partnership is: are the people on the other side of the table positive, and are they forward-thinking enough with content and open and willing enough to really collaborate and do some things differently together?
“By the end of really understanding a full partnership with an organization like the Golden Guardians, it was just a lot more of the same for us,” he continued. “It’s about true, positive advocacy and about a true, positive spirit when it comes to our collaborations, and our moments and activations. They checked both of those boxes for us.”
Credit: Madrinas Coffee
Wearing the Brand
As announced earlier this month, the deal comprises a few key elements. Madrinas Coffee will have an entitlement space for the kitchen—now dubbed the “Recharge Room”—in the team’s Culver City, California headquarters. Additionally, Madrinas branding will appear on all refrigerators in the headquarters, team house, and LCS green room. The companies will collaborate on content throughout the 2019 LCS season, plus there will be social media and Twitch branding elements.
Perhaps most visibly, the Madrinas Coffee logo now has a place on the Golden Guardians’ jersey near the right pectoral muscle, opposite the team’s own logo. We Are Nations has a league-wide deal for LCS jerseys, and Leigh said that it takes several weeks to turn around changes between approvals and manufacturing. That was built into the timing of the Madrinas deal announcement so that the team can showcase the company’s branding right away. The prominent jersey placement suggests the scale of the deal for the Golden Guardians.
“Our guys are obsessed with coffee.”
“The jersey is prime real estate, and we want to make sure that the partners we’re putting there really are ones whose values, mission, and brand we can really stand behind,” said Leigh. “[That] doesn’t say anything about the partnerships that don’t include a jersey part, but I think we want to make sure that those deals rise to the appropriate level.”
Asked about determining the value of a jersey placement, Leigh detailed how organizations typically approach the process—from a visibility standpoint, a brand association perspective, and ultimately determining a monetary value.
“Every team is using some data analytics company to help them tease out how visible their jerseys are more broadly, with the various spots,” he said. “It’s not as simple as a mathematical equation based on impressions, but I think everyone is trying to get a sense of the visibility of the various parts of their jersey on the official broadcast, social graphics, and VODs and other things, to help them put a value around that.”
Leigh clarified that the Madrinas Coffee partnership is a three-year deal and that it’s one that allows room for growth as the Golden Guardians potentially expand into other games beyond League of Legends. He pointed to the battle royale genre as one possibility, and that it would be a great fit for Madrinas given Grzesiak’s popularity streaming games like PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS and Apex Legends.
Credit: lolesports/Riot Games
“Both sides, I think, are interested not only in the current possibilities around League of Legends, which are great—but Madrinas is very active in the battle royale space with their partnerships with Shroud and other popular streamers,” said Leigh. “As we look to expand over the course of this year and into next year, I think it’s natural for both sides to want that partnership to expand as the brand expands.”
Genuine Excitement
Davis called the deal “a major milestone” for Madrinas Coffee, and said that League of Legends‘ position in the esports industry is “beyond impressive.” However, while the visibility of the LCS is obviously key, it’s clear that having a strong personal relationship with a partner is critical for Madrinas. “Everyone I’ve talked to has been super positive and super-aligned on a unified vision, and seeing that from an esports organization is really compelling,” he said. “It provides a lot of context for who our partner is that we’re starting to work with.”
Likewise, Leigh said that on the Golden Guardians side of things, it’s about more than just signing a contract and slapping a logo on the team’s jersey. It was important for the team to find a sponsor that paired well with the players’ own personal interests and needs, as it’ll help them deliver more genuine endorsements when creating content or streaming. The word “authentic” is often used to describe esports partnerships and activations, but Leigh insisted that this pairing with Madrinas is the real deal.
“Half of my life has been dedicated to esports and being in this community either as a competitor or now as a partner with a coffee brand.”
“Our guys are obsessed with coffee,” he said of the Guardians roster. “When we were thinking about the kind of beverage that we’re looking for, coffee was really top of the list from what the guys regularly use. They previously would dip out to a coffee shop 2-3 times a day to get whatever they were looking for in that moment, so being able to bring that in-house with such a high-quality product was really natural for us.”
With the team practicing and/or competing six days a week, he knows that it can be a slog to ask the players to pull away from the grind to produce branded content. That’s why the Golden Guardians try to keep shoots playful and entertaining—but it’s only part of the equation. If the organization can also partner with brands that the team is legitimately excited about, then he believes that it ultimately makes for a more successful activation all around.
“That kind of natural enthusiasm will translate all the way down to our fans,” said Leigh. “It’s hard to put a price on that level of potential engagement. I agree, ‘authenticity’ definitely is a buzzword, and everybody wants it. We talk about it so much that it is overused, but that’s what we’re trying to distill it back down to: a genuine enthusiasm on the part of our players for the product that we’re partnering with and asking them to help promote.”
